I took a Japanese language class the first summer I came to Japan. We were asked to write essays in Japanese. It took me hours. I struggled to look up the kanji, put the verb endings in place, find the right sentence connectors AND still say something of interest. I could always remember how to write about half of a kanji, but half a kanji does not express half-meaning--it expresses nothing at all. My essays sounded like a child, a child with bad grammar.
My essays came back from one teacher bleeding with red lines and lots of question marks. Every single mistake was marked, right down to the smallest ‘tsu.’ This was not my style of grading as a teacher of many years, but I rewrote again and again to get it right, hating, suffering and yet attracted to every minute of it. I felt humiliated but challenged, frustrated but intrigued.
I survived, and even while I did not learn to write a Japanese essay, I did learn several important lessons about essays. First of all, essays are extremely hard to write in another language. Painful, I would say, very painful. Secondly, writing an essay uses all of your language and thinking ability. Because of that, writing essays is the best way, and maybe the only way, to push up to the next level. Lastly, I learned that essays contain an important set of values about learning language.
The values contained in essays are demanding, and that is the main reason why English education in Japan tends to avoid essay writing. Even though most students will probably say that essays were the hardest part of English they ever attempted, essays need to be integrated more fully into all aspects of English study. If students get used to writing essays from a very young age in Japan, the entire English level of the country would rise immensely. It would not only rise, but also extend to become more complex and diverse, too.
Like that teacher who corrected everything in my essay, many teachers treat essays like an overblown grammar exercise. As a result, students come to dread essays more than exams even. However, the true meaning of essays involves the expression of values, attitudes and language in a way that runs entirely against the values in testing and grammar study. It is not just that essays should be assigned more often, but they need to be assigned as true essays, not extended grammar tests.
The word essay in English comes from the French, ‘essayer’ meaning to try. One of the first essayists, Michel de Montaigne, in the 1500s, said that essays were not ways of showing what you already know, but ways of discovering what you want to know. The spirit of discovery and reaching for understanding is what essays are really all about. The attitude of grammar study, in contrast, is about being correct and accurate. Essays encourage a more positive, open and long-term attitude to studying English.
Essays are human-oriented while grammar is rule oriented. Essays include an individual’s opinions, ideas, insights and criticisms. Grammar study leaves no room for human choice among the closed forms of preset exercises. Essays are especially difficult to write because they are so undefined. Some students write essays with fantastic ideas, but bad grammar. More often, though, it is just the opposite: their grammar is perfect, but they do not really say anything. Essays are the best way to learn how to manage this balancing act of correct form and interesting content.
Essays are also about individual expression. Grammar study focuses on conforming to always-correct patterns. Essays want to make new patterns, above the level of grammar, and question rules rather than encourage their passive acceptance. Essays can be very confusing and very threatening because they include so many thoughts, opinions, controversial ideas and abstract concepts. Essays float off into abstract articulations, finding something new, and can be very imaginative and idealistic at times. Grammar, of course, needs adherence to rules that are unchanging and old.
By learning to write essays, students learn a different sense of structure from grammar. Essays must have coherence, unity, order and consistency of thought. These are important structures, just as important as subject-verb-object. Students learn how to think by writing essays, while grammar does not necessarily demand too much thinking. Of course, some essays sometimes resemble reports, which are basically collocations of information, but an essay differs from a report in its thoughtfulness and expressiveness. Essays construct opinions; reports recycle information.
Recently, the testing industry has developed sophisticated software that can analyze the rhetorical level, sentence types, vocabulary usage and other aspects of essays. However, those programs still only look at the grammar of the essay in a more complex way. Computers cannot evaluate the content. To do that, human readers are needed. Those readers, teachers usually, but classmates, too, can look at the grammar, though when essays are graded only on the small points, they become grammar exercises. What readers should do is to respond, understand, disagree or argue back. There’s no argument with grammar study; it’s just right or wrong.
There is already a shift of values towards essays occurring all over Japan. Many high schools start to include essays in class more and more often, along with other kinds of writing like journals, blogging and movie or music reviews. Many universities have started to include an essay section on entrance exams in order to get a very different view of students’ abilities from the ‘multiple-guess’ approach of typical exams. Universities are starting to see that test-taking ability is not the only ability that students need, either at university or in the world. Grammar, listening and reading tests find a narrow range of total language ability. Essays find much, much more.
In the future, writing ability will become one of the key work skills that everyone who has a job must master. In large part, that has already happened. Most jobs involve some sort of writing and certainly many kinds of reading. One of the side benefits of learning to write essays is that reading improves, too. Our very literate period of history right now may be called the “computer” or “information age,” but computers are mainly used for writing and almost all information comes in written form. Essays teach about the very nature of human communication in this day and age.
I could have written this book by gathering data, doing surveys or explaining abstract theoretical concepts. However, I wrote it in essays in order to communicate ideas and concepts and opinions in a direct and human way. Directness and humanness should come first in language learning. Writing essays offers an important set of values and attitudes that are indispensible to making progress, and indeed, to understanding English at an advanced level. Correct grammar only gets you so far, and not that far.
I wouldn’t want anyone to see my old Japanese essays, though, of course. They are a little embarrassing to think about now, but I know they helped more than anything in the slow, painful, and yet wonderfully human process of learning Japanese.
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